Category Page Content
-
Hey Mozzers,
I've recently been doing a content audit on the category and sub-category pages on our site. The old pages had the following "profile"
Above The Fold
Page Heading
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / Products
600 words+ of content duplicated from articles, sub categories and productsMy criticisms of the page were
1. No content (text) above the fold
2. Page content was mostly duplicated content
3. No keyword structure, many pages competed for the same keywords and often unwanted pages outranked the desired page for the keyword.I cleaned this up to the following structure
Above The Fold
H1 Page Heading 80-200 Word of Content (Including a link to supporting article)
H2 Page Heading (Expansion or variance of the H1 making sure relevant) 80-200 150 Words of Content
Image Links to Categories / Products
Below the Fold
The rest of the Image Links to Categories / ProductsThe new pages are now all unique content, targeted towards 1-2 themed keywords. I have a few worries I was hoping you could address.
1. The new pages are only 180-300 words of text, simply because that is all that is needed to describe that category and provide some supporting information. the pages previously contained 600 words. Should I be looking to get more content on these pages?
2. If i do need more content, It wont fit "above the fold" without pushing the products and sub categories below the fold, which isn't ideal. Should I be putting it there anyway or should I insert additional text below the products and below the fold or would this just be a waste.
3. Keyword Structure. I have designed each page to target a selction of keywords, for example.
a) The main widget pages targets all general "widget" terms and provides supporting infromation
b) The sub-category blue widget page targets anything related and terms such as "Navy Widgets" because navy widgets are a type of blue widget etc"
Is this keyword structure over-optimised or exactly what I should be doing. I dont want to spread content to thin by being over selective in my categoriesAny other critisms or comment welcome
-
Thank you, your clarification backed up my theory for most things. The changes I am making also impact design to hopefully increase conversion and userbility at the same time so I think ive got things right.
Cheers for your time.
-
The one overall suggestion is to test your new layout for conversion. Content is good, but is not 100% needed in the amount you have on what seems to be ecommerce category pages. Focus on the conversion and having some content.
1. The new pages are only 180-300 words of text, simply because that is all that is needed to describe that category and provide some supporting information. the pages previously contained 600 words. Should I be looking to get more content on these pages?
No, I've seen categories with less content rank very well. Remember, names of products and other supporting text on the page is content as well. Don't worry about the length.
2. If i do need more content, It wont fit "above the fold" without pushing the products and sub categories below the fold, which isn't ideal. Should I be putting it there anyway or should I insert additional text below the products and below the fold or would this just be a waste.
Nope. Not unless the user needs it.
3. Keyword Structure. I have designed each page to target a selection of keywords, for example.
**a) The main widget pages targets all general "widget" terms and provides supporting **information
b) The sub-category blue widget page targets anything related and terms such as "Navy Widgets" because navy widgets are a type of blue widget etc"
Is this keyword structure over-optimised or exactly what I should be doing. I don't want to spread content to thin by being over selective in my categoriesWhat you are doing sounds reasonable in theory. Stick with that and keep in mind that you only need to worry about specific terms like navy widgets if there is more than one navy widget and there is a high volume of demand for that. There is a lot that goes into this, but try to keep the category page focused to 1-2 terms.
-
Its an eCommerce platform the blog side is a feature where introducing separately so no worries on that front. These will only be one copy of these category pages but they are essential to be indexed and they generate our revenue.
-
Most blog platforms offer the ability to not index various conglomeration pages (category, author etc.) I would recommend using those options so only the actual article page gets indexed.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
On-page SEO
This is a question for the organic SEO experts, once you added the main keyword that you want to rank for in the homepage title, meta title plus meta description, perhaps once or twice in the text on the homepage. How often do you then write it in the content marketing, say blog posts, we want to rank higher on Google for "SEO agencies Cardiff" however if you mention this in the blog posts too much say once a week, this could lead to over optimisation issues?
On-Page Optimization | | sarahwalsh1 -
Landing page separate from product page
Hello there, I have a wordpress website with a woocommerce plugin. I have 4 landing pages that describe my products and at the end of the pages, I have a CTA to my product page. is it bad for SEO? my website: https://relationadviser.ir
On-Page Optimization | | Aaron.be1 -
Duplicated content by the product pages
Hi,Do you thing those pages have duplicate content:https://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-phone-cards/from-Romania-235-2.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-phone-cards-2.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-Cell-phone-cards-401.htmlhttps://www.nobelcom.com/Afghanistan-Cell-phone-cards/from-Romania-235-401.html.And also how much impact will it have on a panda update?I'm trying to figure out if all the product pages, (that are in the same way as the ones above) are the reson for a Panda Penalty
On-Page Optimization | | Silviu0 -
Duplicate Content - What can be duplicate in two different product pages.
I am having a hard time understanding how my 3 different product pages are being shown up as Duplicate Content in s crawl. Some of my 21 different pages are being shown as duplicate content. Here are 3 of those: 1. http://champu.in/korn-rock-band-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india 2. http://champu.in/stop-the-burning-mens-round-neck-t-shirt-india 3. http://champu.in/funny-t-shirts/absolut-punjabi-red-men-s-round-neck-t-shirt Can someone help me with this. Thanks in advance 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | sidjain4you0 -
Ecommerce - how many clicks from the home page should categories be
My client has about 300 products in 20 categories with a lot of overlap. How many clicks from the home page should we keep the products? We're not doing pagination. I'd been told several years ago that all products should be 2 clicks or less from the home page. Is this true today? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW1 -
Duplicate content - what to do?
Hi, We have a whole lot of articles on our site. In total 5232 actually. The web crawler tells me that in the articles we have a lot of duplicate content. Which is sort of nonsense, since each article is unique. Ah, some might have some common paragraphs because they are recurring news about a weekly competition. But, an example: http://www.betxpert.com/artikler/bookmakere/brandvarme-ailton-snupper-topscorerprisen AND http://www.betxpert.com/artikler/bookmakere/opdaterede-odds-pa-sportschef-situationen-pa-vestegnen These are "duplicate content", however the two article texts are not the same. The menu, and the widgets are all the same, but highly relevant to the article. So what should I do? How can i rid myself of these errors? -Rasmus
On-Page Optimization | | rasmusbang0 -
Should I convert PDFs to pages?
I have a client that has a lot of content in pdf files that are linked to from their website. The content on the site itself is quite thin. Should I recommend to them that they convert at least some of pdf files to actual pages on their website? That way there could be a title tag, meta-description, header tags, etc associated with the content. What role do pdf files play in SEO? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | bvalentine0 -
Do product pages need unique content or does having duplcate content hurt on those pages?
We are adding product rapidly to our website but this requires allowing duplicate to exist on our product pages of furniture-online.com. From an SEO standpoint do we need to make this content unique for each product. Since we aren't link building to specific product pages and we don't anticipate product pages being found in a search result, are we ok leaving the duplicate content in place and spending our dollars elsewhere?
On-Page Optimization | | gallreddy0